she’d come in early one day and had the hospital handyman take down the clock. She’d told Siri it was off being serviced. As she never lied, he didn’t question her.
At her desk, Nurse Dtui had her Thai fanzine open in front of her. To anyone walking unexpectedly into the office it would appear she was merely fantasizing her size fourteen frame into a size seven swimsuit as worn by the Bangkok television starlets on photo shoots. But hidden between the pages of her magazine were her Med. 1 Gynaecology notes in Russian. Despite a sudden unexpected pregnancy and the arrival of Malee, now five months old, Dtui had yet to give up her hopes of studying in the Soviet bloc. Unsolicited initiative was considered by the hospital administration to be a suspicious characteristic, a sign that you were not satisfied with your role in the new republic. So she studied surreptitiously. Even though she had no intention of abandoning her baby or her husband and running off to Moscow, she continued to prepare herself for that far-off day when she might take over the morgue. When times were hard, it always helped to have a dream. And times in Vientiane were certainly hard.
But not for some, it seemed. In the corner of the office, behind a desk and a chair he rarely used, Mr. Geung stood rocking gently back and forth in a blissful Down’s syndrome trance. His condition had one of two effects on onlookers. Some were appalled that a moron should be allowed to work at a hospital. Others, like his many fans around Mahosot, were envious of the apparent lack of complication in his life. Devoted to his work. Loyal to a fault. Friendly and honest. Mr. Geung seemed perfectly happy with a no-frills, budget lifestyle. But they all wondered what was going on in his head. How could a middle-aged man with such a terrible affliction seem so at peace? And recently his serenity had risen to a cloud way beyond that elusive number nine. Only Siri and Dtui knew the reason for the elevation. Although Mr. Geung himself was not letting on, his morgue mates could tell. It was romance. Birds did it. Bees did it. And, clearly, Mr. Geung did it too.
Others might have interpreted the marks on their friend’s neck as an allergic reaction to the washing powder in his shirt collar. But Siri and Dtui worked in the morgue. They knew teeth marks when they saw them. They didn’t exactly condone the practice. “One step away from vampirism,” Siri had called it. But neither begrudged Mr. Geung his first taste of romance, albeit in bitten form. Tukda’s arrival at the staff canteen had at first enraged Geung.
“She’s Down … Down’s syndrome,” he’d said, with the same condescending tone he’d heard all his life. “Sh … she shouldn’t be working here.”
But there was no mistaking the fact that Comrade Tukda was a pretty young lady and sweet natured. None of Mr. Geung’s protestations persuaded his coworkers that he didn’t find her attractive. And Geung and Tukda, through those mysterious corridors and hidden passageways of the syndrome, found each other. What they did and where and how and if, nobody knew. Only the washing powder allergy on Geung’s neck, and the sappy grins when they mentioned her name, gave anything away. He answered no questions on the subject. Denied all accusations. It was his … their secret. But there was no doubting the fact that Mr. Geung was a very happy man.
And this was how the members of the morgue team filled their days. Siri counting minutes. Dtui conjugating. Geung rocking. Then, all of a sudden, on one hot July morning, a note arrived. That such a flimsy slip of paper could have the effect it did would have been hard to imagine.
The morning crowd was silently engaged in the serious act of consuming Madame Daeng’s noodles. It was like watching a herd of buffalo-albeit seated-working their way through a garden of lush grass. Extra stools had been imported, dotted willy-nilly around the tables but still there wasn’t enough seating. Daeng and Siri encouraged diners to leave as soon as possible so others might enjoy their breakfasts, but Madame Daeng’s noodles were not to be rushed. They were the
Siri stood beside her, gazing proudly at the lake of hunched shoulders and bobbing heads.
“Looks like I won’t have to worry about us starving to death when I retire,” he said.
Daeng looked up from the boiler, gently tossed a wire basket of pasta, then lowered it back into the bubbling water. She was a fine-looking woman with a mop of gray hair that always made her seem as if she’d been racing a fast-moving motorcycle, which often she had.
“And there I was wondering how we’d ever make do without your thirty-thousand
“Two eighty. But let’s not forget all the other perks.”
“A dozen mosquito coils. Four kilos of weevil-infested rice. The occasional gardening implement. Socks. Six rolls of self-dissolving toilet paper. I don’t know how we’ll survive.”
“And the petrol allowance.”
“Two litres a month. You’ll have to start riding my bicycle.”
“I’ll have nowhere to go. I’ll just be hanging around under your feet like this-day in day out. You always said you wished we could spend more time together.”
“I don’t think I meant all of it. Couple of hours in the evening would be nice.”
“I shall be yours twenty-four hours a day to do with as you wish. Your love slave around the clock.”
Daeng laughed and scooped noodles into a bowl of broth. As there were no more stools, the customer collected the dish and sat with it on the bottom step of the staircase.
“Siri, you could no more stay put for twenty-four hours than I could. You’ll be poking your nose in here, gallivanting there. And to tell you the truth, if I wanted a love slave I’d find myself a much much younger man. A body builder. I get plenty of offers, you know.”
“Ha! He’d have to go through me first to get to you. You hear that, you lot?” he shouted. “Anyone here tempted to run off with my wife will have to fight me first.”
“No problem,” said Pop, a wizened old bean stick whose weight more than doubled after one of Daeng’s spicy number 2s. He was probably the only customer in the shop older than Siri and he looked it. “Look at the state of you,” he said to Siri. “Barely a fortnight out of your sick bed, broken hand, scars and bruises all over. Huh. I reckon I could take you with one hand, especially if Daeng was the prize. One blow with this teaspoon and you’d be on your back.”
“Is that right, Comrade?” Siri replied. “Then let’s see about that.”
He grabbed a chopstick from the jar with his functioning hand and went at Pop with a fencing parry. Pop got to his feet and held out his teaspoon. A utensil duel ensued, egged on by the clatter of chopsticks against tin water mugs from all around them.
A teenager in a white shirt stepped in off the dusty sidewalk and sidled nervously across to the noodle seller, bemused by the melee.
“Comrade,” he said, “I have an urgent note for Dr. Siri Paiboun. They said I’d find him here.”
“That’s him,” she said. “Over there. The little boy with the white hair and messy eyebrows brandishing a chopstick. They’re fighting over me, you know?”
The boy wasn’t together at all.
“Go ahead. Give it to him,” she told him. He reluctantly walked up behind Siri and tapped him on the shoulder. Siri turned and Pop, not one to miss an opportunity, whacked Siri on his lobeless left ear with his spoon. Siri cried in mock pain and sank to his knees. The percussion of sticks on mugs heralded Pop their champion. In the throes of an ignominious teaspoon death, Siri seized the note from the lad’s outstretched hand and died on the noodle shop floor. It was just another day at Daeng’s noodle shop.
2
Nino Sebastian had done very nicely for himself out of his stint with Air America. He’d lived frugally, made a little extra here and there by selling things that weren’t exactly his to sell, and unlike the Romeos at the Udon base, he didn’t pump his salary into the bars and massage parlours. When it was all over he’d come back to Manila, built a house and a service station, and married a girl who’d never have looked at him twice without the forty thousand dollars in his pocket. His mother and father pumped gas, his sister looked after the canteen, and he and his brother
